Gaming names that actually fit.

Social platforms

• Discord

  2–32 characters

  Since Discord retired the four-digit discriminator in 2023, usernames are forced lowercase — Latin a-z, 0-9 and exactly two symbols, the full stop and the underscore. Capitals, spaces, emoji and non-Latin text are all rejected, which is the commonest surprise for anyone carrying a styled name over from another platform. Two consecutive full stops are also refused: a.b. is fine, a..b. is not. Your display name is a separate field of 1 to 32 characters that does accept uppercase, spaces, emoji and non-Latin text, and can be changed as often as you like — so the usual answer is a plain username with an expressive display name over the top.

• YouTube

  3–30 characters

  The 3-30 range applies to Latin-script handles. Other scripts get their own limits — Han and Hangul run 1-10, and Ethiopic, Hiragana and Katakana run 2-20 — because the same number of characters carries far more meaning. Underscores, hyphens, full stops and the Latin middle dot are allowed but never at the start or end. Handles are not case-sensitive, and you cannot build one that looks like a URL or a phone number.

• Twitch

  4–25 characters

  The thing most guides get wrong: a Twitch display name is not a free-text field. It is only a re-capitalisation of your username, so the username you pick is the name you get, and the only flexibility is which letters are capitals. The one exception is the localised display name, available to users whose site language is Arabic, Chinese, Korean or Japanese, which sits ahead of the username, must be unique, cannot mix in Latin characters or symbols, and has its own 60-day cooldown. Abandoned usernames on non-partnered accounts are held at least 180 days before anyone can claim them.

• Snapchat

  3–15 characters

  Snapchat is the strictest platform here and also the most clearly documented. Fifteen characters maximum, Latin letters and numbers only, and it is the one major platform that accepts a hyphen alongside the underscore and full stop. A username must start with a letter and end with a letter or a number, so a name that opens or closes on punctuation is refused. You get one change per year, counted to the day, which makes this the single worst platform on which to pick a name you might regret. The display name is a separate 30-character field that does take emoji and spaces.

• TikTok

  2–24 characters

  Two to twenty-four characters, letters, numbers, underscores and full stops, with the one extra rule that a full stop cannot be the last character. TikTok runs two separate cooldowns and they are easy to confuse: the username can be changed once every 30 days, while the nickname — the display name shown on your profile — is capped at 30 characters and can be changed once every 7 days. A released username is unavailable to others for what TikTok describes only as a short period, without ever putting a number on it.

• Xbox

  1–12 characters

  Twelve characters since the 2019 overhaul, and unusually permissive within them: spaces are allowed, and so are thirteen Unicode scripts covering over two hundred languages, including Cyrillic, Greek, Devanagari, Bengali, Thai and the CJK sets. What is not allowed is emoji or symbols such as % and $, and a gamertag cannot begin with a number. Xbox then appends a hash and a numeric suffix to make the tag unique — twelve characters leaves room for only three suffix digits, ten characters leaves five, so a shorter tag buys you a rarer suffix. Only Latin-script gamertags are eligible to appear without one.